This is the sixth post in (the first annual?) Short Week at freddiedeboer.substack.com. Since people constantly complain that my stuff is too long, this week all posts will be 500 words or less. We will return to our usual longwinded ways next week.
I've never seen Fight Club, so I can't comment on it. I have seen American Beauty, though. I would characterize that film as being about a mid-life crisis rather than a reaction to the state of society at a given time. Kevin Spacey's character is a middle-aged guy who has done all the things he was supposed to do -- built a career, gotten married, had a child, bought a house -- and although this is supposed to be more or less the definition of personal fulfillment (according to conventional society), he's miserable. The job sucks, the marriage is dead, his relationship with his daughter is lousy. So he, in effect, tries to get a do-over on his adult life by starting over in adolescence. He gets a job in a fast-food place (standard high-schooler's job), gets the now-30-year-old muscle car he dreamed of when he was young, gets obsessed with a high-school girl, does drugs... and as anyone with any sense would have predicted, it doesn't work, and in fact it just makes things worse.
But think about the circumstances in which the protagonist meets Marla for the first time. Isn't Pahlaniuk telegraphing something here: that authenticity just isn't an option in the society he depicts?
He's a primary example of why Film Twitter became so incredibly fraught after Trump won. Following the election, he stopped the all-caps gimmick. That's fine, but then in the years to come he became extremely, insufferably, unbearably woke. I'm not kidding. It was like someone bottled the very essence of Tumblr and he swallowed the whole thing. Every movie that came out during the Trump years that Woke Twitter hated, he was right there in the trenches. And he writes in an incredibly condescending manner now, as if the entire world can be divided into right-thinking Woke people who like the Morally Correct movies (and TV shows, and videogames), versus the rest of us plebes who might as well be Gamergate (which I'm not; fuck Gamergate). It's revolting, and he and people like him did a real number on me and my mental health.
Forgive me for rambling, but those days were really rough. They nearly killed my love of film.
I strongly agree that the hand-waving "it's all satire" is always so irritating to me. I'm fine with your take on how this movie is not meant literally, because at least it's not hand-waving. But that hand-waving happens a lot of movies where smart people assure me the movie isn't endorsing the characters -- I think immediately of Wolf of Wall Street -- and I'm a philistine for thinking it does. I don't understand what there is to enjoy on a ironic level. Something like, I dunno, This is Spinal Tap is a satire -- you watch it to laugh AT them. That is definitely not what's happening in Fight Club and Wolf of Wall Street.
Funny that you mentioned that Film Crit Hulk analysis of Fight Club, since he pulled an absolute 180 a few years later in making a point about Scorsese's gangster movies: Goodfellas doesn't "glorify" gangsters when it makes them look cool because gangsters *are* cool. They're tough and sly and funny and free of a lot of constraints that make normal life frustrating and humiliating. If you can't acknowledge this on at least some level, your gangster movie just isn't true.
So there's good reason to point out that Fight Club isn't quite satire in the usual sense: Tyler Durden kind of a caricature, but he's also really fucking cool. He's a soap pirate who looks like Brad Pitt and blows up credit card companies. That's cool as shit. He's also an arrogant, amoral manipulator who wrecks lives--that's not cool, and at no point does the movie ask you to ignore that. I don't get why internet debaters can't handle a contradictory character when we've had them since Greek tragedies.
About Fight Club... I love it. Always have. The mind-fuck brand of storytelling has huge appeal for me. Though I never once thought about starring an actual fight club. That's insane.
Yes, agreed, and it's in more than just that scene - the whole film changes when you see it through the lens of men who are afraid of women. When I'm feeling especially saucy, I like to trot out my personal take that Fight Club is actually one of the salient feminist artworks of the last couple decades (plus a year or so). I didn't think so when I first saw it (as an adolescent who was afraid of girls and found the prospect of self-effacing toughness very appealing), but the more I've thought about it since, plus a few more viewings, the more I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. Instead of reckoning with his own vulnerability, Jack continues to double-down on hypermasculine (to the point of overt homoeroticism that people twisted themselves in knots trying to pretend wasn't there) efforts to self-actualize. The world his split psyche builds is the inversion of his initial misery as a sexless, lifeless drone: the same lack of identity and humanity, except now he's a fascist instead of a consumer.
Note also that Tyler doesn't appear until after Marla - the entry of a feminine avatar for his own desperate urge for authenticity and openness - appears. He's smitten, but he turns away from any chance of romance because their shared deception threatens the remaining layer of security: she knows the dumb name stickers he wears to the support groups are false. Vulnerability appears to be a dead end, so: he invents Tyler.
And the answer? To get in touch with his feminine side - which he does, at the end, to the genuinely positive vision of creative destruction. It's a utopian-feminist masterpiece!
Also note the brilliant editing of the explosion occurring when Marla picks up the phone: as if Jack's psyche is overwhelmed by the prospect of this feminine presence in his life. That Fincher, he's a real one.
What are the chances? I watched Fight Club last night, first time in years. I was expecting it to have aged poorly, but boy was I wrong.
It's very much of its time in certain ways: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression." Yeah? Just wait a few years! And yet the movie is full of the same "losers" we cyclically become aware of and then forget: Dishwashers, petty managers, office slaves, the perennially unemployed... Incels and NEETs, in the parlance of our times.
I don't find discussions about whether something is satire or not particularly interesting... Just not my bag. But along those lines, it is very telling that people don't understand why the movie was so fucking popular with some many people, many of which were neither white nor men! One of my friends was a very angry Taiwanese girl with severe Christian parents, and she worshipped that movie. Life sucks for most people, and this movie captures that quotidian suckiness fairly well. And people whose lives suck rarely want to just wallow in that suckiness---That's for the comfortable arthouse crowd. They also don't necessarily want to make things better, another common fallacy. They want destruction. So the movie shows these losers hurting the people they hate, blowing stuff up, making themselves feared and infamous: A simple atavistic formula that works every time.
Is it "immoral"? Is it "bad"? I don't know, I'm not a priest. I have no way of answering these questions. But some people do think it is indeed "very bad," and honestly that just makes me like the movie more.
This was fun and helped me with a movie that I always wanted to like but couldn't ever derive anything beyond the cheap superficial stuff ("Bob had bitch tits..."). Also, I just want point out that my informal assessment of "Short Week" is that yes, you've written shorter posts, but there are more of them and I still can't keep up. Gotta say it's fun to subscribe to a writer for whom inspiration comes so naturally and prolifically.
I've never seen Fight Club, so I can't comment on it. I have seen American Beauty, though. I would characterize that film as being about a mid-life crisis rather than a reaction to the state of society at a given time. Kevin Spacey's character is a middle-aged guy who has done all the things he was supposed to do -- built a career, gotten married, had a child, bought a house -- and although this is supposed to be more or less the definition of personal fulfillment (according to conventional society), he's miserable. The job sucks, the marriage is dead, his relationship with his daughter is lousy. So he, in effect, tries to get a do-over on his adult life by starting over in adolescence. He gets a job in a fast-food place (standard high-schooler's job), gets the now-30-year-old muscle car he dreamed of when he was young, gets obsessed with a high-school girl, does drugs... and as anyone with any sense would have predicted, it doesn't work, and in fact it just makes things worse.
But think about the circumstances in which the protagonist meets Marla for the first time. Isn't Pahlaniuk telegraphing something here: that authenticity just isn't an option in the society he depicts?
So, about that guy you linked to....
He's a primary example of why Film Twitter became so incredibly fraught after Trump won. Following the election, he stopped the all-caps gimmick. That's fine, but then in the years to come he became extremely, insufferably, unbearably woke. I'm not kidding. It was like someone bottled the very essence of Tumblr and he swallowed the whole thing. Every movie that came out during the Trump years that Woke Twitter hated, he was right there in the trenches. And he writes in an incredibly condescending manner now, as if the entire world can be divided into right-thinking Woke people who like the Morally Correct movies (and TV shows, and videogames), versus the rest of us plebes who might as well be Gamergate (which I'm not; fuck Gamergate). It's revolting, and he and people like him did a real number on me and my mental health.
Forgive me for rambling, but those days were really rough. They nearly killed my love of film.
I strongly agree that the hand-waving "it's all satire" is always so irritating to me. I'm fine with your take on how this movie is not meant literally, because at least it's not hand-waving. But that hand-waving happens a lot of movies where smart people assure me the movie isn't endorsing the characters -- I think immediately of Wolf of Wall Street -- and I'm a philistine for thinking it does. I don't understand what there is to enjoy on a ironic level. Something like, I dunno, This is Spinal Tap is a satire -- you watch it to laugh AT them. That is definitely not what's happening in Fight Club and Wolf of Wall Street.
Funny that you mentioned that Film Crit Hulk analysis of Fight Club, since he pulled an absolute 180 a few years later in making a point about Scorsese's gangster movies: Goodfellas doesn't "glorify" gangsters when it makes them look cool because gangsters *are* cool. They're tough and sly and funny and free of a lot of constraints that make normal life frustrating and humiliating. If you can't acknowledge this on at least some level, your gangster movie just isn't true.
So there's good reason to point out that Fight Club isn't quite satire in the usual sense: Tyler Durden kind of a caricature, but he's also really fucking cool. He's a soap pirate who looks like Brad Pitt and blows up credit card companies. That's cool as shit. He's also an arrogant, amoral manipulator who wrecks lives--that's not cool, and at no point does the movie ask you to ignore that. I don't get why internet debaters can't handle a contradictory character when we've had them since Greek tragedies.
About Fight Club... I love it. Always have. The mind-fuck brand of storytelling has huge appeal for me. Though I never once thought about starring an actual fight club. That's insane.
Yes, agreed, and it's in more than just that scene - the whole film changes when you see it through the lens of men who are afraid of women. When I'm feeling especially saucy, I like to trot out my personal take that Fight Club is actually one of the salient feminist artworks of the last couple decades (plus a year or so). I didn't think so when I first saw it (as an adolescent who was afraid of girls and found the prospect of self-effacing toughness very appealing), but the more I've thought about it since, plus a few more viewings, the more I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. Instead of reckoning with his own vulnerability, Jack continues to double-down on hypermasculine (to the point of overt homoeroticism that people twisted themselves in knots trying to pretend wasn't there) efforts to self-actualize. The world his split psyche builds is the inversion of his initial misery as a sexless, lifeless drone: the same lack of identity and humanity, except now he's a fascist instead of a consumer.
Note also that Tyler doesn't appear until after Marla - the entry of a feminine avatar for his own desperate urge for authenticity and openness - appears. He's smitten, but he turns away from any chance of romance because their shared deception threatens the remaining layer of security: she knows the dumb name stickers he wears to the support groups are false. Vulnerability appears to be a dead end, so: he invents Tyler.
And the answer? To get in touch with his feminine side - which he does, at the end, to the genuinely positive vision of creative destruction. It's a utopian-feminist masterpiece!
Also note the brilliant editing of the explosion occurring when Marla picks up the phone: as if Jack's psyche is overwhelmed by the prospect of this feminine presence in his life. That Fincher, he's a real one.
What are the chances? I watched Fight Club last night, first time in years. I was expecting it to have aged poorly, but boy was I wrong.
It's very much of its time in certain ways: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression." Yeah? Just wait a few years! And yet the movie is full of the same "losers" we cyclically become aware of and then forget: Dishwashers, petty managers, office slaves, the perennially unemployed... Incels and NEETs, in the parlance of our times.
I don't find discussions about whether something is satire or not particularly interesting... Just not my bag. But along those lines, it is very telling that people don't understand why the movie was so fucking popular with some many people, many of which were neither white nor men! One of my friends was a very angry Taiwanese girl with severe Christian parents, and she worshipped that movie. Life sucks for most people, and this movie captures that quotidian suckiness fairly well. And people whose lives suck rarely want to just wallow in that suckiness---That's for the comfortable arthouse crowd. They also don't necessarily want to make things better, another common fallacy. They want destruction. So the movie shows these losers hurting the people they hate, blowing stuff up, making themselves feared and infamous: A simple atavistic formula that works every time.
Is it "immoral"? Is it "bad"? I don't know, I'm not a priest. I have no way of answering these questions. But some people do think it is indeed "very bad," and honestly that just makes me like the movie more.
brad pitt eating stuff.
This was fun and helped me with a movie that I always wanted to like but couldn't ever derive anything beyond the cheap superficial stuff ("Bob had bitch tits..."). Also, I just want point out that my informal assessment of "Short Week" is that yes, you've written shorter posts, but there are more of them and I still can't keep up. Gotta say it's fun to subscribe to a writer for whom inspiration comes so naturally and prolifically.
It's a love story! and a lot more.